1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a message broadcast system. More particularly, the present invention relates to a system and method of accepting message data from a plurality of sources and automatically uploading this data to a plurality of preselected, external database systems while controlling these database systems to reflect the information contained in the message. Particular utility of the present invention is in the prevention of receiving unsolicited email, mail and telephone calls from direct advertisers by providing a system for the automatic removal of personal identification data from the database systems of bulk mailing and marketing groups. Another utility for the present invention is for an information dispersal system by providing a system for the automatic dispersion of information and/or information request data to a plurality of preselected database systems that contain data related to the information and/or information request data; although other utilities are contemplated herein.
2. Description of Related Art
One problem that virtually every person who receives mail has experienced is receiving unsolicited advertisements or so-called xe2x80x9cjunk mailxe2x80x9d. Most people find junk mail to be time consuming and frustrating because they must sift through the unsolicited ads to get to important mail. Email users who have email accounts on the internet suffer from the same dilemma, as unsolicited email advertisements have become a highly popular method of attracting business. Again, receivers must waste valuable time reading and deleting unsolicited email while trying to read important email. Telemarketing, like bulk mailing and bulk emailing, has grown into a multi-billion dollar industry and is particularly frustrating because often telemarketers choose to telephone prospective customers at hours when customers are likely to be home (e.g., nights, weekends, etc.).
The majority of unsolicited advertisements, via mail, email, or telephone, stem from direct mail marketing groups who maintain vast databases containing thousands of individuals"" personal identification (e.g., name, email address, mailing address, telephone number, etc.). These direct mail marketing groups, or xe2x80x9cwarehousesxe2x80x9d, sell customer lists to direct mail, email and telephone advertisers, where each list contains a certain number of individual personal identification data.
According to several authorities, there are over 123,000,000 postal addresses in the U.S. that receive mail from the U.S. Postal Service. Individually, an average of 41 pounds of mail are sent to every adult per year. About 44% goes unread directly into the garbage and about 93% of junk mail is ultimately discarded. The average American spends 8 full months of their life opening postal bulk mail. In addition to time waste imposed by bulk mail upon the receiver, bulk mailing has substantial environmental impacts as well. Approximately 60% of bulk mail is never read, rather, it is discarded immediately. This greatly contributes to the amount of solid waste deposited in land fills, where it is estimated that 49% of municipal solid waste is generated from paper and paper products. Thus, bulk mailing creates an individual impact in terms of frustrating time waste, and an environmental impact in terms of excess solid waste.
Producing such a vast amount of paper products used by bulk mailers also has significant environmental consequences. Dioxin, one of the most toxic substances known, is generated by paper mills which use chlorine bleaching in their process of producing PVC (polyvinyl chloride) mailers and bags, as used quite often by bulk mailers. Aside from the immediate toxicity of dioxin, the long-term affects of exposure to dioxin are now known to include an overall increase of cancer, reduced sperm count and breast cancer.
There are over 14.7 million people in the US who access on-line services. Direct mailers and bulk mailers are now using the internet to target email addresses. Junk email, or xe2x80x9cspamxe2x80x9d, is an annoyance because the recipient must open the mail, read it and then delete the message. In addition bulk email consumes finite internet resources by consuming memory space, access time and phone line usage which in turn consumes energy and natural resources.
Bulk mailers and direct market advertisers admit that there is very little success from bulk mailing. Rather, the approach is to xe2x80x9cblanket the marketxe2x80x9d with thousands of mailings knowing that the return is a very small percentage. One solution to prevent bulk mail, bulk email and unsolicited telephone calls is that a person can have his or her information deleted from the database of a bulk mailer or direct advertiser. However, a person must contact each of these warehouses individually to have his or her personal information removed. There are, at present, approximately 4200 such warehouses, thus, it would be virtually impossible for an individual to access all of the warehouses that contain personal data that is sold to, or used by, bulk mailers, bulk emailers and direct telemarketers. Furthermore, more and more direct marketing warehouses are appearing because of the tremendous financial value of supplying personal identification data to direct mailers and marketing groups.
Thus, there exists a need for a system that will allow a user to supply a message containing personal information such as name, address, email address and telephone number to a central controller and have the central controller automatically broadcast the message to a plurality of preselected database systems containing the personal information, and to have a central controller control these database systems to remove personal information from the database systems.
Most states have laws mandating that direct mailers and marketing groups remove personal information from their customer lists, upon request from an individual. However, as mentioned above, an individual must contact every direct mail and marketing warehouse in order to effectively remove their personal information from being accessed by bulk mailer, bulk emailers and telemarketers. Accordingly, there exists a need to allow an individual upload a request to remove personal information from a vast collection into a central controller and have that central controller upload that individuals request to a plurality of database systems, whereby the administrators of such database systems will remove that individuals personal information from the database, as required by law.
There exist many commercially available products that provide a system to remove xe2x80x9cspamxe2x80x9d (unsolicited email) from an email account. However these products typically employ a locally stored program that contains a locally stored list of known xe2x80x9cspamersxe2x80x9d, where the program simply filters out any email matching the list of known xe2x80x9cspamersxe2x80x9d. Thus, disadvantageously, any new xe2x80x9cspamersxe2x80x9d having new email addresses will not be filtered out. Moreover, a spamer need only change the email address to circumvent such a system. Most significantly, such systems do not solve the ultimate problem of unsolicited email because such systems fail to remove email account information from the source of the spam, i.e., marketing warehouses.
Unfortunately, none of the prior art systems discloses a system having a central controller that automatically broadcasts a user supplied message to a preselected set of external databases and control those databases to reflect information data contained in the message. Moreover, none of the prior art message broadcast systems contemplate providing a system that utilizes a centralized controller that allows customers to upload personal identification data whereby the centralized controller automatically communicates with and controls a plurality of preselected databases to remove information from those databases that matches the personal identification data. In addition, none of the prior art systems provide a message broadcast system that allows a user to upload a removal request to a central controller and have that central controller broadcast that user""s removal request to a plurality of direct mail and marketing warehouses.
Another aspect of the present invention is in the dispersal of information based on a particular information request. Information access and dispersal is known in the art. For example, a user can access the internet and perform a search over the internet in an attempt to reveal sources that might contain the particular information request. Several search sites on the internet, for example, Yahoo, AltaVista, Netscape, etc. are available to users. However, such systems are most often hit-or-miss searches that require a user to spend valuable time modifying search parameters to reveal the information. Moreover, such searches are typically very broad in scope (e.g., the entire internet is searched) which usually does not give specific information that is requested, rather, most often such searches only reveal broad aspects of a particular search request.
Inherently, searching over the internet is often called xe2x80x9cdummyxe2x80x9d searching because internet search routines are designed to handle a broad variety of searches. These search results are rarely helpful because of the broad nature of the search and the voluminous xe2x80x9chitsxe2x80x9d that such searches find. Internet searches are ill equipped to handle specialized searches based on specific, targeted types of information because the internet is designed specifically for broad applicability. Thus, internet searching for specialized information is highly inefficient and most often does not provide meaningful results. Thus, there exists a need to provide specialized searching of a plurality of related database systems based on specific parameters provided by a user, thereby providing efficient and meaningful results to users who require specific information.
Prior art message broadcast systems include LAN and WAN systems that can transmit single-point-to-multiple-point data. However, none of the prior art solves the problem of targeting specific database systems for information removal and/or information request data since none of the prior art contemplates providing a centralized controller adapted to accept such data from a plurality of sources (i.e., users and customers) and have the centralized controller control a plurality of appropriate database systems to either remove the information data from the appropriate database systems, or, in the alternative, transmit the information request data to the appropriate database systems so that these database systems can provide the information requested directly back to the user or customer.
The message broadcast system of the present invention, and as described herein, is intended to be a specialized information dispersal system that provides a user with efficient, meaningful information for a variety of specialized interests. For example, the present invention can be utilized by doctors who wish to broadcast an email message containing a request to solicit responses on, e.g., the latest drug for a given disease, the latest reports on a given disease, the latest research on a disease, the latest information on treatment of a disease, and/or reporting (via message broadcast) personal research on a disease. Such a system must, of course, be in communication with appropriate database systems such as universities, hospitals, governmental agencies (e.g., CDC), doctor groups, research groups, pharmaceutical companies, etc.
The message broadcast system herein described can also be used to automatically broadcast an email message to every senator, congressman, party official, elected officials involved in a particular bill up for vote, etc., so that a user can register voting and political preference. In addition, the system of the present invention can be utilized to register conventions, seminars and/or local events and provide a system whereby users can order information related to a particular convention, seminar or local event. Other utilities are contemplated herein. For example, the present invention can be utilized as a centralized commercial transaction system whereby users (or customers) can engage in a variety of commercial transactions using the aforementioned information dispersal system of the present invention. These are just a few examples of the specialized nature of the present invention that has clear advantages over prior art information dispersal systems. To facilitate meaningful efficient information dispersal, the present invention is adapted to communicate with and control a plurality of preselected database systems that are related directly to an information request, so that resources and time are not wasted by overly broad searches that rarely provide meaningful results such as those found in the art.
Accordingly, the present invention provides a message broadcast system comprising at least one message data generator adapted to generate message data that contains preference data; at least one preselected database system; and a central controller adapted to communicate with said message data generator and said database systems to receive and store said message data from said message data generator, and to broadcast said message data to said preselected database systems to reflect said preference data contained in said message data.
One embodiment of the present invention provides a system to remove information from a plurality of remote database systems comprising a central controller adapted to communicate with at least one message data generator to receive and store at least one message containing personal identification data therein generated by said message data generator, said central controller generating control signals to control a plurality of preselected database systems to remove information matching said personal identification data from said database systems.
In method form, the present embodiment provides a method to remove personal identification data from a plurality of database systems containing such data comprising the steps of generating a message containing personal identification information therein; uploading the message into a central controller; having the central controller select a plurality of remote database systems having the personal identification data therein; connecting the central controller to the plurality of remote database systems; and
controlling the plurality of remote database systems from the central controller to remove information matching the personal identification data from the database systems.
Advantageously, the system and method of this embodiment can be provided with a PIN server system in communication with a network server. The PIN server is adapted to generate a unique PIN access code to a user. The message data generator can be adapted to communicate with the PIN server via said network server and adapted to generate message data that contains the PIN access code and personal identification data related to the user of said message data generator. Also, the central controller can be adapted to communicate with the network server to receive and store the message data from the message data generator and adapted to communicate with and control the preselected database systems to remove the personal identification data from the database systems.
Another embodiment of the present invention provides an information dispersal system comprising a central controller adapted to communicate with at least one message data generator to receive and store at least one message containing information request data therein generated by said message data generator. The central controller generates control signals to control a plurality of preselected database systems to disperse information requested in the information request data back to the message data generator.
In method form, the present embodiment provides method to disperse information based on information contained in an information request comprising the steps of generating a message containing information request data therein; uploading the message into a central controller; having the central controller select a plurality of remote database systems having information related to the information request therein; connecting the central controller to the plurality of remote database systems; and controlling the plurality of remote database systems from the central controller to disperse information related to the information request from the database systems.
Advantageously, the system of this embodiment can be provided with a PIN server system in communication with a network server wherein the PIN server adapted to generate a unique PIN access code to a user. The message data generator is adapted to communicate with the PIN server via said network server and adapted to generate message data that contains the PIN access code and information request data. The central controller is adapted to communicate with the network server to receive and store the message data from said message data generator and adapted to broadcast the message data to a plurality of preselected database systems and control the database systems to disperse information related to the information request.
The aforementioned PIN server can be adapted to provide the user with a debit report and provide the central controller with a credit report. Thus, advantageously, the present invention can provide an account system for each individual user based on the PIN access code. Advantageously, the central controller can be adapted to permit user access to the central controller only after verification of the PIN access code.
In any of the embodiments described herein, the central controller is adapted to control the database systems to optimally permit information removal and/or information dispersal. Advantageously, central controller contains optimal search routines (algorithms) and removal routines, and such optimal routines are based on the type of information contained in the message data (i.e., information removal request or information dispersal request) and the specific database system which central controller will control. Thus, central controller contains a subsystem which is adapted to automatically interpret the message data for the information contained therein, determine which databases are to be controlled, and to automatically employ the optimal search and/or removal control routine based on the message data and the particular database system. Thus, advantageously, central controller is adapted to employ multiple optimal control and search and/or removal routines for a predetermined set of database systems based on the message data. Thus, the present invention provides efficient information dispersal based on particularized information request to disperse information concerning a plurality of specialized user preferences. Such a system is heretofore unseen in the art because the prior art does not provide for efficient, specialized information dispersal; nor does the prior art provide a system to remove personal identification from a plurality of preselected marketing warehouse database systems. Moreover, the information removal and/or information dispersal system of present invention has advantages over the art because the central controller is adapted to optimally control a specific set of geographically remote database systems based on stored control parameters and given message data containing an information request and/or information removal request. Such advantages are not found in the prior art.
It will be appreciated by those skilled in the art that although the following Detailed Description will proceed with reference being made to preferred embodiments and methods of use, the present invention is not intended to be limited to these preferred embodiments and methods of use. Rather, the present invention is of broad scope and is intended to be limited as only set forth in the accompanying claims.
Other features and advantages of the present invention will become apparent as the following Detailed Description proceeds, and upon reference to the Drawings, wherein like numerals depict like parts, and wherein: